The Grandfather Paradox and A question.?

Question

If it is true, then there would be no difference between letting him live and killing him since in the end both of you should still be alive. But what would happen if some guy from another dimension who is not anyway related to you but in that dimension is related to the Grandfather is his own dimension's life, shoots the Grandfather. Should you be wiped out(and never have existed) and the other guy be alive?

Answer 1

And now a really really complicated answer...

Yeah, there'd have to be a split of timelines... If you kill grandpa then you killed grandpa... therefore you exist. If you exist, grandpa had kids and there's no other way about it.

Otherwise, if it happened it didn't happen, and if it didn't happen, it happened. (if it's all in the same timeline)

I suppose, yes, it could turn into a loop... Actually, now that I think of it, I may have seen some science fiction like that. If you get into this loop, then time goes into a figure eight, and henceforth never progresses beyond when you go back in time...

(it only forms a figure 8 if someone else in the new timeline goes back and saves your grandpa from you.)

...but that's still multiple timelines.

I suppose that's a possibility, that you go back in time, and then that timeline is just truncated right there... In any case, that's all you'd know, for you couldn't get back to it.

In any case, my opinion is that such things cannot happen; information cannot be passed backward in time.

Although I am intrigued by the nature of time, space and motion at event horizons of black holes, my initial exploration of the subject some years ago seemed to indicate that any pair of particles would be separated by an infinite distance at the same moment that they began to travel backward in time.

The trick used in the movie "Contact" was to build what they called a "naked singularity," I think, to get around this problem, but of course they only used that to defeat the Speed of Light limit; which is effectively the same as going back in time, since receding galaxies are Lorentz time dilated since the beginning of the universe.

Good luck, and don't kill your grandfather. Such things are in poor taste.

Answer 2

Hypothesizing that there are alternate realities, killing you grandfather in another reality would in no way affect you in this one. in fact, the only way for one to affect another would be for someone to travel between them: ie, you traveling to another reality and killing your grandfather.

As we don't really know anything about time travel and its effects aside from what we "learn" from Sci-Fi books/movies/shows, this question is difficult to answer and largely moot anyway. A widely held theory in Sci-Fi is that, by the act of time traveling, you are outside the timeline and thus not directly affected by the changes, leaving you able to remember the "real" timeline.

You really want to "time travel?" Grab a telescope and look at some stars. You're seeing them as they were hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. Time travel enough for anyone.

Answer 3

No each instance splits off another space-time continuum which is affected only by the actions that formed it's basis. Since you were born in a continuum where your grandfather lived, there's no way for you to be "un-born".

Answer 4

How can we possibly know? We don't know if there is a multiverse. This is like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What sounds perfectly logical may have no basis in reality and what sounds fanciful may be true.

There is no real answer. Perhaps this is why time travel is impossible?

Answer 5

An incident that begins can end but never not have existed.
Your particular scenarios would amount to just that.

Answer 6

Huh ??? Slow day in middle school ?